Oswald Spengler, Prophet of World Chaos

Schmidt Number: S-4946

On-line since: 31st August, 2018

OSWALD SPENGLER

Two lectures byRudolf Steiner

August 6 and 9, 1922

Translated by Frances E. Dawson

I

When
some time ago the first volume of Spengler's Decline
of the West appeared, there could be discerned in this
literary production something like the will to tackle more
intensively the elemental phenomena of decay and decline in our
time. Here is a man who felt in much that is now active in the
whole western world an impulse toward decline that must
necessarily lead to a condition of utter chaos in western
civilization, including America; and it could be seen that the
man who had developed such a feeling — a very
well-informed person, indeed, with mastery of many scientific
ideas — was making the effort to present a sort of
analysis of these phenomena.

It is
clear, of course, that Spengler recognized this decline;
and it is evident also that he had a feeling for
everything of a declining nature exactly because all his
thinking was itself involved in this decline; and because he
felt this decadence in his very soul, I might say, he
anticipated nothing but decadence as the outcome of all
mass civilization. That is comprehensible. He believed that the
West will become the prey of a kind of Caesarism, a sort
of development of individual power, which will replace
the differentiated, highly-organized cultures and
civilizations with simple brute-force.

It is
evident that Spengler, for one, had not the slightest
perception of the fact that salvation for this western culture
and civilization can come out of the will of mankind, if this
will, in opposition to all that is moving headlong toward
destruction, is directed toward the realization of
something that can yet be brought forth out of the soul of man
as a new force, if the human being of today wills it so. Of
such a new force — naturally a spiritual force, based on
spiritual activity — Oswald Spengler had not the
slightest understanding.

Thus
we can see that a very well-informed, brilliant man, with a
certain penetrating insight, and able to coin such
telling phrases, can actually arrive at nothing beyond a
certain hope for the unfolding of a brute-power, which is
remote from everything spiritual, from all inner human
striving, and which depends entirely upon the development of
external brutish force.

However, when the first volume appeared, it was possible to
have at least a certain respect for the penetrating
spirituality (I must use the expression again) — an
abstract, intellectualistic spirituality — as opposed to
the obtuseness of thinking which by no means is equal to the
driving forces of history, but which so often gives the keynote
to the literature of today.

Oswald
Spengler's second volume has now appeared, and this indeed
points out much more forcefully all that lives in a man of the
present which can become his world-conception and philosophy,
while he himself rejects, with a sort of brutality,
everything genuinely spiritual. This second volume is likewise
brilliant; yet in spite of his clever observations, Spengler
shows nothing more than the dreadful sterility of an
excessively abstract and intellectualistic mode of thought. The
matter is extraordinarily noteworthy because it shows what a
peculiar configuration of spirit can be attained by an
undeniably notable personality of today.

In
this second volume of Spengler's Decline of the West, it
is primarily the beginning and the end that are of
exceptional interest. But it is a melancholy interest
which this beginning and end arouse; they really
characterize the whole state of this man's soul. You need to
read only a sentence or two at the beginning in order to
estimate at once the soul-situation of Oswald Spengler, and
likewise of many other people of the present time. What is to
be said of it has not merely a German-literary significance,
but an altogether international one.

Spengler begins with the following sentence:
[The Decline of the West, by Oswald
Spengler; Volume II: Perspectives of World History.
Translated by Atkinson (Knopf). The above citation, however,
and all others used herein are translated from the original
of Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, by the
translator of this lecture.
Ed.]
“Observe the flowers in the evening, when in the setting
sun they close one after the other; something sinister
oppresses you then, a feeling of puzzling anxiety in the
presence of this blind, dreamlike existence bound to the earth.
The mute forest, the silent meadows, yonder bush, and these
tendrils, do not stir. It is the wind that plays with them.
Only the little gnat is free. It still dances in the evening
light; it moves whither it will,” and so on.

Notice
the starting-point from the flowers, from the plants. Now when
I have wished to point to what gives its significance to the
thinking of the present, I have again and again found it
necessary to begin with the kind of comprehension applied
today to lifeless, inorganic, mineral nature. Perhaps some of
you will remember that in order to characterize the
striving of present-day thinking for clarity of view, I have
often used the example of the impact of two resilient balls,
where from the given condition of one ball you can deduce the
condition of the other by pure calculation.

Of
course, anyone of the Spenglerian soul-caliber can say that
ordinary thinking does not discover how resilience works in
these balls, nor what the relations are in a deeper sense.
Anyone who thinks thus does not understand upon what clarity of
thought depends at the present time. For such an
objection would have neither greater validity nor less
than would an assertion by someone that it is impossible for me
to understand a sentence written down on paper without first
having investigated the composition of the ink with which it is
written. The important thing is always to discover the point at
issue. In surveying inorganic nature, the matter of concern is
not what may eventually be discovered behind it as
force-impulse, just as the composition of the ink is not the
important thing for the understanding of a sentence written
with it; but the matter of importance is whether clear
thinking is employed.

This
definite kind of thinking is what humanity has achieved since
the time of Galileo and Copernicus. It shows first that man can
grasp by means of it only lifeless, inorganic nature; but that,
on the other hand, only by yielding himself to it, as to the
simplest and most primitive kind of pure thinking, can he
develop freedom of the human soul, or any kind of freedom for
man. Only one who understands the character of clear, objective
thinking, as it holds sway in lifeless nature, can later rise
to the other processes of thinking and of seeing —
to that which permeates thought with vision, with inspiration,
with imagination, with intuition.

Therefore, the first task confronting one who wishes to speak
today with any authority on the ultimate configuration of our
cultural life is to observe what it is that the power of
present-day thinking rests upon. And those who have become
aware of this power in the thinking of our time know that this
thinking is active in the machine, that it has brought us
modern technical sciences, in which by means of this thinking
we construct external, lifeless, inorganic sequences, all of
whose pseudo-intelligence is intended to contribute to the
outer activities of man.

Only
one who understands this begins to realize that the moment we
start to deal with plant-life, this kind of thinking,
grasped at first in its abstractness, leads to utter
nonsense. Anyone who uses this kind of crystal-clear
thinking — appropriate in its abstractness to the mineral
world alone — not as a mere starting point for the
development of human freedom, but instead employs it in
thinking about the plant-world, will have before him in the
plant-world something nebulous, obscure, mystical, which he
cannot comprehend. For as soon as we look up to the plant-world
we must understand that here — at least to the
degree intended by Goethe with his primordial-plant
(Urpflanze), and with the principle by means of
which he traced the metamorphosis of this primordial-plant
through all plant-forms — here at least in this Goethean
sense, everyone who approaches the plant-world with a
recognition of the real force of the thought holding sway in
the inorganic world must perceive that the plant-world remains
obscure and mystical in the worst sense of our time, unless it
is approached with imagination — at least in the sense in
which Goethe established his botanical views.

When
anyone like Oswald Spengler rejects imaginative cognition and
yet starts describing the plant-world in this way, he reaches
nothing that will give clarity and force, but only a kind of
confused thinking, a mysticism in the very worst sense of the
word, namely materialistic mysticism. And if this has to
be said about the beginning of the book, the end of it is in
turn characterized by the beginning. The end of this book deals
with the machine, with that which has given the very signature
to modern civilization — the machine, which on the one
hand is foreign to man's nature, yet is on the other precisely
the means by which he has developed his clear thinking.

Some
time ago — directly after the appearance of Oswald
Spengler's book, and under the impression of the effect it was
having — I gave a lecture at the College of Technical
Sciences in Stuttgart on Anthroposophy and, the Technical
Sciences, in order to show that precisely by submersion in
technical science the human being develops that configuration
of his soul-life which makes him free. I showed that, because
in the mechanical world he experiences the obliteration of all
spirituality, he receives in this same mechanical world the
impulse to bring forth spirituality out of his own being
through inner effort. Anyone, therefore, who comprehends the
significance of the machine for our whole present
civilization can only say to himself: This machine, with
its impertinent pseudo-intelligence, with its dreadful,
brutal, demonic spiritlessness, compels the human being, when
he rightly understands himself, to bring forth from within
those germs of spirituality that are in him. By means of the
contrast the machine compels the human being to develop
spiritual life.

But as
a matter of fact, what I wished to bring out in that lecture
was understood by no one, as I was able to learn from the
after-effects.

Oswald
Spengler places at the conclusion of his work some observations
about the machine. Well, what you read there about the machine
finally leads to a sort of glorification of the fear of it. We
feel that what is said is positively the apex of modern
superstition regarding the machine, which people feel as
something demonic, as certain superstitious people sense the
presence of demons. Spengler describes the inventor of the
machine, tells how it has gradually gained ground, and little
by little has laid hold of civilization. He describes the
people in whose age the machine appeared.

“But for all of them there also existed the really
Faustian danger that the devil might have a hand in the game,
in order to lead them in spirit to that mountain where he
promised them all earthly power. That is what is meant by the
dream of those strange Dominicans, like Peter Peregrinus, about
the perpetual motion device, through which God would have been
robbed of His omnipotence. They succumbed to this ambition
again and again; they extorted his secret from the Divinity in
order to be God themselves.”

So
Oswald Spengler understands the matter thus: that because
man can now control machines, he can through this very act of
controlling, imagine himself to be a God, can learn to be a
God, because, according to his opinion, the God of the cosmic
machine controls the machine. How could a man help feeling
exalted to godhood when he controls a microcosm!

“They hearkened to the laws of the cosmic time-beat in
order to do them violence, and then they created the idea of
the machine as a little cosmos which yields obedience only
to the will of man. But in doing so they overstepped that
subtle boundary where, according to the adoring piety of
others, sin began; and that was their undoing, from Bacon to
Giordano Bruno. True faith has always held that the machine is
of the devil.” Now he evidently intends at this point to
be merely ironic; but that he intends to be not only ironic
becomes apparent when in his brilliant way he uses words
which sound somewhat antiquated. The following passage shows
this:

“Then follows, however, contemporaneously with
Rationalism, the invention of the steam-engine, which
overturns everything and transforms the economic picture from
the ground up. Till then nature had given service; now it is
harnessed in the yoke as a slave, and its work
measured, as in derision, in terms of horse-power. We passed
over from the muscular strength of the negro, employed in
organized enterprise, to the organic forces of the
earth's crust, where the life-force of thousands of years lies
stored as coal, and we now direct our attention to inorganic
nature, whose waterpower has already been harnessed in
support of the coal. Along with the millions and billions of
horse-power the population increases as no other
civilization would have considered possible. This growth is a
product of the machine, which demands service and
control, in return for which it increases the power of each
individual a hundredfold. Human life becomes precious for
the sake of the machine. Work becomes the great word in
ethical thinking. During the eighteenth century it lost its
derogatory significance in all languages. The machine works and
compels man to work with it. All civilization has come
into a degree of activity under which the earth quivers.

“What has been developed in the course of scarcely a
century is a spectacle of such magnitude that to human beings
of a future culture, with different souls and different
emotions, it must seem that at that time nature reeled. In
previous ages, politics has passed over cities and peoples;
human economy has interfered greatly with the destinies of the
animal and plant world — but that merely touches life and
is effaced again. This technical science, however, will leave
behind it the mark of its age when everything else shall have
been submerged and forgotten. This Faustian passion has altered
the picture of the earth's surface.

“And these machines are ever more dehumanized in their
formation; they become ever more ascetic, more mystical and
esoteric. They wrap the earth about with an endless web of
delicate forces, currents, and tensions. Their bodies become
ever more immaterial, even more silent. These wheels,
cylinders and levers no longer speak. All the crucial
parts have withdrawn to the inside. Man senses the machine as
something devilish, and rightly so. For a believer it
indicates the deposition of God. It hands over sacred causality
to man, and becomes silent, irresistible, with a sort of
prophetic omniscience set in motion by him.

“Never has the microcosm felt more superior toward the
macrocosm. Here are little living beings who, through their
spiritual force, have made the unliving dependent upon them.
There seems to be nothing to equal this triumph, achieved by
only one culture, and, perhaps, for only a few centuries.
But precisely because of it the Faustian man has become the
slave of his own creation.”

We see
here the thinker's complete helplessness with regard to
the machine. It never dawns on him that there is nothing in the
machine that could possibly be mystical for anyone who
conceives the very nature of the unliving as lacking any
mystical element.

And
thus we see Oswald Spengler beginning with a hazy recital about
plants, because he really has no conception at all of the
nature and character of present-day cognition — which is
closely related to the evolution of the mechanical life —
because to him thinking remains only an abstraction, and on
this account he is also unable to perceive the function of
thinking in anything mechanical. In reality, thinking here
becomes an entirely unsubstantial image, so that the human
being in the mechanical age may become all the more real, may
call forth his soul, his spirit, out of himself by resisting
the mechanical. That is the significance of the machine-age for
the human being, as well as for world-evolution.

When
anyone intending to begin with metaphysical clarity starts out
instead with a hazy recital about plants, he does so because in
this mood he is in opposition to the machine. That is to say,
Oswald Spengler has grasped the function of modern
thinking only in its abstractness, and he sets to work on
something that remains dark to him, namely, the
plant-world.

Now
taking the mineral, the plant, the animal, and the human
kingdoms, the last-named may be characterized for the present
time by saying that since the middle of the fifteenth century
we have advanced to the thinking that makes the mineral kingdom
transparent to us. So that when we look at the human being of
our time, as he is inwardly, as observer of the outer world, we
must say that as human being he has at this precise time
developed the conception of the mineral kingdom. But then
we must characterize the significance of this mineral-thinking
in the way I have just now characterized it.

But
when someone who knows nothing of the real nature of the
mineral kingdom takes his start from the plant kingdom,
he gets no farther than the animal kingdom. For the animal
bears in itself the plant-nature in the same form we today bear
the mineral nature. It is characteristic of Oswald Spengler,
first, that he begins with the plant, and in his concepts
in no way gets beyond the animal (he deals with man only in so
far as man is an animal) ; and second, that thinking really
seems to him to be extraordinarily comprehensible, whereas, in
reality, as I have just explained, it has been understood
in its true significance only since the fourteenth century. He
thus lets his thinking slide down just as far as possible into
the animal world. We see him discovering, for example, that he
has sense-perception, just as has the animal, and that this
sense-perception, even in the animal, becomes a sort of
judgment. In this way he tries to represent thinking
merely as something like an intensification of the perceptive
life of the animal.

Actually no one has proved in such a radical way as this same
Oswald Spengler that the man of today with his abstract
thinking reaches only the extra-human world, and no longer
comprehends the human. And the essential characteristic
of the human being, namely, that he can think, Oswald Spengler
regards only as a sort of adjunct, which is inexplicable
and really superfluous. For, according to Spengler, this
thinking is really something highly superfluous in man.

“Understanding emancipated from feeling is called
thinking. Thinking has forever brought disunion into
the human waking state. It has always regarded the intellect
and the perceptive faculty as the high and the low soul-forces.
It has created the fatal contrast between the light-world of
the eye, which is designated as a world of semblance and
sense-delusion, and a literally-imagined world, in which
concepts with slight but ever-present accent of light pursue
their existence.”

Now in
setting forth these things Spengler develops an extraordinarily
curious idea; namely, that in reality the whole spiritual
civilization of man depends upon the eye, that it is really
only distilled from the light-world, and concepts are only
somewhat refined, somewhat distilled, visions in the light,
which are transmitted through the eye. Oswald Spengler
simply has no idea that thinking, when it is pure thought, not
only receives the light-world of the eye, but unites this
light-world with the whole man. It is an entirely
different matter whether we think of an entity which is
connected with the perception of the eye, or speak of
conceptions or mental pictures. Spengler has something to say
also about conceptions, or mental pictures (Vorstellen);
but at this very point he tries to prove that thinking is only
a sort of brain-dream and rarified light-world in man.

Now I
should like to know whether with any kind of thinking that is
not abstract, but is sound common sense, the word
“stellen” (to put or place),
when it is experienced correctly, can ever be associated with
anything belonging to the light-world. A man “places”
himself with his legs; the whole man is included. When we say
“vorstellen” (to place before, to represent),
we dynamically unite the light-entity with what we experience
within as something dynamic, as a force-effect, as something
that plunges down into reality. With realistic thinking, we
absolutely dive down into reality. Consider the most important
thoughts. Aside from mathematical ones, thoughts always lead
to the realization that in them we have not merely a
light-air-organism, but also something which man has as
soul-experience when he causes a thought to be illuminated at
the same time that he places both feet on the earth.

Therefore, all that Oswald Spengler has developed here about
this light-world transformed into thinking is really nothing
but exceedingly clever talk. It is absolutely necessary that
this should be stated: the introduction to this second volume
is brilliant twaddle, which then rises to such assertions
as the following:

“This impoverishment of the sense-faculties involves at
the same time an immeasurable deepening. The human waking
existence is no longer mere tension between the body and the
surrounding world. It is now life in a closed,
surrounding light-world. The body moves in observable
space. The experience of depth is a mighty penetration
into visible distances from a light-center. This
is the point which we call ‘I’, ‘I’ is a
light-concept.”

Anyone
who asserts that “I” is a light-concept has no
idea, for example, how intimately connected is the experience
of the I with the experience of gravity in the human organism;
he has no notion at all of the experience of the mechanical
that can arise in the human organism. But when it does arise
consciously, then the leap is made from abstract thinking to
the realistic, concrete thinking that leads to reality.

It
might be said that Oswald Spengler is a perfect example of the
fact that abstract thinking has become airy, and also light,
and has carried the whole human being away from reality, so
that he reels about somewhere in the light and has no suspicion
that there is also gravity; for example — that there is
also something that can be experienced, not merely looked at.
The onlooker standpoint of John Stuart Mill, for instance, is
here carried to the extreme. Therefore, the book is exceedingly
characteristic of our time.

One
sentence on page 13
[Der Untergang des Abendlandes, Vol. II.]
appears terribly clever, but it is really only light and airy:
“One fashions conception upon conception and finally
achieves a thought-architecture in great style, whose edifices
stand there in an inner light, as it were, in complete
distinctness.”

So
Oswald Spengler starts out with mere phraseology. He finds the
plant-world “sleeping”; that represents first of
all the world around us, which is thoroughly asleep. He finds
that the world “wakes up” in the animal kingdom,
and that the animal develops in itself a
kind of microcosm. He gets no farther than the animal, but
develops only the relation between the plant-world and
the animal-world, and finds the former in the sleeping state
and the latter in the waking state.

Mineral

Sleeping:

_

Plant

Waking:

Animal

Human

But
everything that happens in the world really comes about under
the influence of what is sleeping. The animal —
therefore, for Oswald Spengler, man also — has
sleep in himself. That is true. But all that has significance
for the world proceeds from sleep, for sleep contains
movement. The waking state contains only tensions —
tensions which beget all sorts of discrepancies within, but
still only tensions which are, as it were, just one more
external item in the universe. Actually, an independent reality
is one which arises from sleep.

And in
this broth float all sorts of more or less superfluous,
or savory and unsavory blobs of grease — which is the
animal element; but there could be broth without these blobs of
grease, except that these bring something into reality. In
sleep the Where and the How are not to be found,
but only the When and the Why. So that we find
the following in the human being, who contains the plantlike as
well — of the role played by the mineral element in the
human being Oswald Spengler has no notion — so that in
man we find the following: in as far as he is plantlike,
he lives in time; he takes his stand in the “When”
and the “Why,” the earlier being the Why of the
later. That is the causal factor. And by living on thus through
history man really expresses the plantlike in history. The
animal-element — and therefore the human as well —
which inquires as to the “Where” and the
“How,” these (the animal and human elements) are
just the blobs of grease that are added to it. (This is quite
interesting as far as the inner tensions are concerned, but
these really have nothing to do with what takes place in the
world.) So we can say: Through cosmic relationships the
“When” and the “Why” are implanted in
the world for succeeding ages.

And in
this on-flowing broth the grease-blobs float with their
“Where” and “How.” And when a man
— just one such drop of grease — floats in this
broth, the “Where” and the “How” really
concern only him and his inner tensions, his waking existence.
What he does as a historical being proceeds from sleep.

Long
ago it was said as a sort of religious imagination: The Lord
giveth to his beloved in sleep. To the Spenglerian man it
is nature that gives in sleep. Such is the thinking of one of
the most prominent personalities of the present time, who,
however — in order to avoid coming to terms with himself
— plunges into the plant kingdom, thence to emerge no
farther than the animal kingdom, into which the human also is
stirred.

Now
one would suppose that this concoction with its
cleverness would avoid the worst blunders that thinking
has made in the past; that is, that it would somehow be
consistent. If the plant-existence is to be poured out over the
history of humanity, then let the concoction be confined to the
plant kingdom. It would be difficult, however, to enter upon a
historical discussion concerning the man of the plant
kingdom. Yet Oswald Spengler does discuss historically, even
very cleverly, the plantlike activity of humanity during sleep.
But in order that he may have something to say about this sleep
of humanity, he makes use of the worst possible kind of
thinking, namely, that of anthropomorphism, artificially
distorting everything, imagining human qualities into
everything. Hence, he speaks — as early as on page
9 — of the plant, which has no waking-existence, because
he wants to learn from it how he is to write history, and also
give a description of the activity of man that arises from
sleep.

But
let us read the first sentences on page 9: “A plant leads
an existence with no waking state” — Good. He
means: “In sleep all beings become plants,” that
is, man as well as animal — All right. — “the
tension with the surrounding world is released, the measure of
life moves on.” And now comes a great sentence: “A
plant knows only the relation to When and Why.” Now the
plant begins not only to dream, but to “know” in
its blessed sleep. Thus one faces the conjecture that this
sleep, destined to spread perpetually as history in human
evolution, might now begin to wake up. For then Oswald Spengler
could just as well write a history as to attribute to the
plants a knowledge of When and Why. Indeed this
sleep-nature of the plant has even some highly
interesting qualities:

“The thrusting of the first green spears out of the
winter-earth, the swelling of the buds, the whole force of
blossoming, of fragrance, of glowing, of ripening —
this is all desire for the fulfilment of a destiny and a
constantly yearning query as to the Why.”

Of
course history can very easily be described as plantlike,
if the writer first prepares himself to that end through
anthropomorphisms. And because all this is so, Oswald Spengler
says further:

“The Where can have no meaning for the plantlike
existence. That is the question with which the awakening
human being daily recalls his world. For only the
pulse-beat of existence persists through all the generations.
The waking existence begins anew with each microcosm. That is
the distinction between procreation and birth. The one is
guarantee for permanence, the other is a beginning. And
therefore, a plant is procreated but not born. It exists, but
no awakening, no first day, spreads a sense-world around
it ...”

If
anyone wishes to follow Spenglerian thoughts, he must really,
like a tumbler, first stand on his head and then turn over, in
order mentally to reverse what is thought of in the human sense
as right side up. But you see by concocting such

metaphysics, such a philosophy, Spengler arrives at the
following: This sleeping state in man, that which is
plantlike in him, this makes history. What is this in man? The
blood — the blood which flows through the
generations.

Well,
in this way Spengler prepares a method for himself, so
that he can say: The most important events developed in
human history occur through the blood. To do this he must of
course cut some more thought-capers:

“The waking existence is synonymous with ‘ascertaining’
(Feststellen), no matter whether the point in question
is the sense of touch in one of the infusoria or human
thinking of the highest order.”

Certainly when anyone thinks in such an abstract way, he simply
fails to discover the difference between the sense of touch in
one of the infusoria and human thinking of the highest
order. He comes then to all sorts of extraordinarily strange
assertions, such as: that this thinking is really a mere
adjunct to the whole human life, that deeds originate in the
blood, and that out of the blood history is made. And if there
are still a few people who ponder about this, they do so with
purely abstract thinking that has nothing whatever to do with
actuality.

“That we not only live, but know about life, is the
result of that observation of our corporeal being in the light.
But the animal knows only life, not death.”

And so
he explains that the thing of importance must come forth out of
obscurity, darkness, out of the plantlike, out of the blood;
and he claims that those people who have achieved anything in
history have done so not at all as the result of an idea, of
thinking — but that thoughts, even those of
thinkers, are merely a by-product. About what thinking
accomplishes, Oswald Spengler has no words disparaging
enough.

And
then he contrasts with thinkers all those who really act,
because they let thinking be thinking; that is, let it be the
business of others.

“Some people are born as men of destiny and others as men
of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and
warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world,
merchant, everyone who wishes to become rich, to command,
to rule, to fight, to take risks, the organizer, the
contractor, the adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world
apart from the ‘spiritual’ man” (Spengler puts
‘spiritual’ in quotation marks), “from the saint, the
priest, the scholar, idealist, ideologist, regardless of
whether he is destined thereto by the power of his thinking or
through lack of blood. Existence and being awake, measure and
tension, instincts and concepts, the organs of circulation and
those of touch — there will seldom be a man of
eminence in whom the one side does not unquestionably surpass
the other in significance.

“... the active person is a complete human being.
In the contemplative person a single organ would like to act
without the body or against it. For only the active man,
the man of destiny” (that is, one whom thoughts do not
concern) — “for only the active man, the man of
destiny, lives, in the last analysis, in the real world,
the world of political, military, and economic crises, in
which concepts and theories count for nothing. Here a good blow
is worth more than a good conclusion, and there is sense in the
contempt with which the soldiers and statesmen of all times
have looked down on the scribbler and the book-worm, who has
the idea that world-history exists for the sake of the spirit,
of science, or even of art.”

That
is a plain statement; in fact, plain enough for anyone to
recognize who said it: that it is definitely written by
none other than a “scribbler and book-worm,” who
merely puts on airs at the expense of others. Only a
“scribbler and bookworm” could write:

“Some people are born as men of destiny and some as men
of causality. The man who is really alive, the peasant and
warrior, the statesman, general, man of the world, merchant,
everyone who wishes to become rich, to command, to rule, to
fight, to take risks, the organizer, the contractor, the
adventurer, the fencer, the gambler, is a world apart
from the ‘spiritual’ man, from the saint, the priest, the
scholar, idealist, ideologist” ... As if there had
never been confessionals and father confessors! Indeed, there
are still other beings from whom all those classes of men glean
their thoughts. In the society of all such people as have been
mentioned — statesmen, generals, men of the world,
merchants, fencers, gamblers, and so on — there have even
been found soothsayers and fortune-tellers. So that
actually the “world” that is supposed to separate
the statesman, politician, etc., from the
“spiritual” man is in reality not such an enormous
distance. Anyone who can observe life will find that this
sort of thing is written with utter disregard of all
life-observation. And Oswald Spengler, who is a brilliant man
and an eminent personality, makes a thorough job of it. After
saying that in the realm of real events a blow is worth more
than a logical conclusion, he continues thus:

“Here a good blow is worth more than a good conclusion,
and there is sense in the contempt with which the soldiers and
statesmen of all times have looked down on the scribbler and
the book-worm, who has the idea that world-history exists
for the sake of the spirit, of science, or even of art. Let us
speak unequivocally: Understanding liberated from feeling
is only one side of life, and not the decisive side. In the
history of western thought, the name of Napoleon may be
omitted, but in actual history Archimedes, with all his
scientific discoveries, has perhaps been less influential
than that soldier who slew him at the storming of
Syracuse.”

Now if
a brick had fallen on the head of Archimedes, then, according
to this theory, this brick would be more important, in the
sense of real logical history, than all that originated with
Archimedes. And mind you, this was not written by an ordinary
journalist, but by one of the most clever people of the present
time. That is exactly the significant point, that one of the
cleverest men of the present writes in this way.

And
now exactly what is effective? Thinking? That just
floats on top. What is effective is the blood. Anyone who
speaks about the blood from the spiritual viewpoint, that is,
speaks scientifically, will ask first of all how the blood
originates, how the blood is related to man's
nourishment. In the bowels blood does not yet exist; it is
first created inside the human being himself. The flow of the
blood down through the generations — well, if any kind of
poor mystical idea can be formed, this is it. Nothing that
nebulous mystics have ever said more or less distinctly about
the inner soul-life was such poor mysticism as this Spenglerian
mysticism of the blood. It refers to something that precludes
all possibility, not only of thinking about it — of
course that would make no difference to Oswald Spengler,
because no one really needs to think, it is just one of the
luxuries of life — but one should cease to speak about
anything so difficult to approach as the blood, if one pretends
to be an intelligent person, or even an intelligent higher
animal.

From
this point of view, it is perfectly possible, then, to
inaugurate a consideration of history with the following
sentence:

“All great historical events are sustained by such beings
of a cosmic nature, as dwell in peoples, parties, armies,
classes; while the history of the spirit runs its course in
loose associations and circles, schools, educational
classes, tendencies — in ‘isms.’ And here it is again a
matter of destiny whether such a group finds a leader at the
decisive moment of its greatest efficiency, or is blindly
driven forward, whether the chance leaders are men of high
caliber or totally insignificant personalities raised to the
summit by the surge of events, like Pompey or Robespierre. It
is the mark of the statesman that he comprehends with complete
clarity the strength and permanence, direction and
purpose of all these soul-masses which form and dissolve in the
stream of time; nevertheless, here also it is a question of
chance as to whether he will be able to rule them, or is
dragged along by them.” In this way a consideration of
history is inaugurated which lets the blood be the conqueror of
everything that enters historical evolution through the
spirit! Now:

“One power may be overthrown only by another
power, not by a principle, and against money, there is no
other” (but blood, he means). “Money is vanquished
and deposed only by blood. Life is the first and last, the
illimitable cosmic flux in microcosmic form. It is the
fact in the world as history. Before the irresistible rhythm of
successive generations, everything that the waking life has
built up in its worlds of spirit finally disappears. The fact
of importance in history is life, always only life, the race,
the triumph of the will to power, and not the victory of
truths, discoveries, or money. World-history is
world-judgment. It has always decided in favor of life that
was more vigorous, fuller, more sure of itself, in favor,
that is, of the right to live, whether it was just or not in
the waking life; and it has always sacrificed truth and
righteousness to power, to race, and has condemned to death men
and whole peoples to whom truth was more precious than deeds,
and justice more essential than power. Thus another drama
of lofty culture, this whole wonderful world of divinities,
arts, thoughts, battles, cities, closes with the primeval
facts of the eternal blood, which is one and the same with the
eternally circling, cosmic, undulating flood. The clear,
form-filled waking existence plunges again into the silent
service of life, as demonstrated by the Chinese epoch and by
the Roman Empire. Time conquers space, and time it is whose
inexorable passage imbeds on this planet the fleeting
incident — culture, in the incident — man, a form
in which the incident — life, flows along for a time,
while behind it in the light-world of our eyes appear the
flowing horizons of earth-history and star-history.

“For us, however, whom destiny has placed in this culture
at this moment of its evolution when money celebrates its last
victories, and its successor, Caesarism, stealthily and
irresistibly approaches, the direction is given within
narrow limits which willing and compulsion must follow, if life
is to be worth living.”

Thus does Oswald Spengler point to the coming
Caesarism, to that which is to come before the
complete collapse of the cultures of the West, and into which
the present culture will be transformed.

I have
put this before you today because truly the man who is awake
— he matters little to Oswald Spengler — the man
who is awake, even though he be an Anthroposophist, should take
some account of what is happening. And so I wished from this
point of view to draw your attention to a particular problem of
the time. But it would be a poor conclusion if I were to
say only this to you concerning this problem of our time.
Therefore, before we must have a longer interval for my trip to
Oxford, I will give another lecture next week Wednesday.